A quite compelling response to this article showed up on the [microsound] list,
from Joshua Maremont.
'scuse my monoculture :)
best,
Derek
+++
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002 18:25:06 -0800
From: Joshua Maremont <thermal {AT} boxmanstudies.com>
To: microsound <microsound {AT} hyperreal.org>
Subject: Re: [microsound] Where Music Will Be Coming From
An interesting read, yes, but the writer seems to couch his quite
valid reflections and predictions in a commercial-consumer model of
music which I find limited and backward in its struggle - mirroring
that of the MP3 and Napster litigations - to retroactively
recontextualize some of the most revolutionary aspects of digital
cultural creation and dissemination by way of a strained antique
economic model. His analysis is right on the mark until he
lemming-trots into a wool-over-eyes future in which the current model
of musicians financially enslaved to a centralized system of
distribution and patronage is magically metamorphosized into what a
marketing consultant would surely name a "net-savvy" version of the
same arrangement (see: SDMI and subscription downloads). For me
this analysis - like those of the entertainment industry plaintiffs
in soft-music legal actions - misses (or deliberately hides) an
entirely different future of music in which the laws of musical
economics are not simply retooled or upturned (remember the New
Economy?) but completely discredited down to the validity of their
component terms and concepts. This other future is one in which
profit and music are not likely to be mentioned in the same sentence,
in which music is made by those who now only buy it, and in which the
source of the audio data is less important than the experience of
finding and hearing and using it - one in which labels and stars lose
their centrality and priority and become mere nodes in a system they
no longer control. And organs of the ever more loudly creaking
centralized system - like Yahoo or NTY or Wired - cannot be happy to
consider such implications of their own irrelevance. I would retitle
the article: Where Corporate Music Will Be Bought From. I imagine
few here will be shopping at that mall, except for the occasional and
covert girl-/boy-band fix.
np - "Vertical Forms" compilation
--
Joshua Maremont / Thermal - mailto:thermal {AT} boxmanstudies.com
Boxman Studies Label - http://www.boxmanstudies.com/
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